Choosing not to buy minerals from a particular source doesn't affect anything, as they just end up being sold to someone else for the same price
Only if there are other buyers. And, if a large number of buyers are unwilling to do business with some suppliers then the other buyers may be in a position to push the price down.
They also forgot that they were selling luxury goods. A company like Oracle or Microsoft can get away with a certain amount of customer irritation because people use their products to make money and need to plan a migration strategy and spend money to switch away. A game publisher is not just competing with other game sellers, it's competing with other sources of entertainment for a finite budget. In a recession, luxury spending is the first thing that most people cut and that pushes down the supply of dollars that EA is competing for. They made it very easy for people to put them at the top of their spending cut list.
You seriously do NOT know what a FRAND patent is, and that it can NOT be used to sue someone.
You absolutely can sue over a FRAND patent. FRAND means Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory. The patent holder must offer to license the patent to all comers under these terms. If someone decides not to take the offered license and still infringes the patent then the patent holder can still sue.
it was bloody obvious that Florian was a "paid for opinion" going back a few years
It wasn't obvious to me. I assumed that no company would be stupid enough to pay for someone to spout things as obviously wrong as Florian - that they'd want shills who could slip misinformation into otherwise-insightful posts. Apparently Oracle has very low standards for shills. On the one hand, I think it's great that shills are so blatant, on the other I wonder if there's a job opportunity if I ever get bored...
Look for 'permanent revolution' in your favourite reference source. The Communist philosophy required expansion and continued conversion of new countries to communism. The goal was to spread to the entire world. Marx suggested that capitalism was just one stage in the development of a society that eventually ended with communism[1].
Immediately after the second world war, the Russians had an enormous army, including massive numbers of tanks and economy geared to their production. Within a few years, they had nukes too. When you have a well-armed country that espouses a philosophy of turning every country with your political system into one that you oppose, along with a very well funded and organised intelligence arm that exists to promote revolutions in other countries, you have a reason to worry. Oh, and the USSR wasn't that far away. If you take a look at this map you can see how close it came to the USA (specifically, Alaska). They had a large staging area for an oversea invasion, with only a slightly larger distance at sea than D-Day invasion.
By the later stages of the cold war, it wasn't about capitalism or communism - both sides were practicing slight different forms of oligarchy and having a Big Scary Enemy was very useful. Since the end of the cold war, the USA has flailed around trying to find a replacement.
[1] It's still not entirely clear that he was wrong, although the Soviet approach of skipping most of the other steps clearly did end up with totalitarianism rather than communism.
12% is basically impossible for any essay that cites something else. Turnitin also counts citations that other people also cited as duplications, so all of my students got a 20%+ similarity rating just from having similar bibliographies to other papers and from the occasional (attributed) quote.
They're also pretty useless. I tried using them for a course I taught. I tested it initially by providing it with the PDF of the notes. I was slightly impressed that it had already found the PDF of the notes on the course site and added it to its index. I was less impressed that it said the bit-for-bit identical copy that I'd uploaded was 70% the same as the online version. If 70% means 'every byte in this file is the same as every byte in the other file' then I wonder what 80% means. Apparently 20% means that it couldn't find anything that was copied. It also has a complete inability to detect quotes and citations, so generally a higher score meant a good essay because students who quoted relevant parts of sources and cited them got flagged by turnitin for plagiarism even though the source that turnitin 'found' was the one specified next to the quote.
You could probably get mostly the same results by just running diff on the essay text and the contents of everything it cited...
If the position is wrong, it is impossible to argue for it effectively. Therefore it is unjust to dock points for failing to argue for an incorrect position effectively.
Not at all. To start with, few things are completely wrong. Consider something like the luminiferous aether or the ancient greek theory of how vision worked. It's possible to argue quite convincingly for either because it's only in the last few hundred years that we've had experiments that have allowed us to disprove either. Unless someone else brings up one of these experiments (which they wouldn't in an essay because there is no response) then you can be quite convincing. It's the exact technique used by the best intelligent design advocates or global warming deniers: say things that are entirely plausible as long as you ignore some subset of experimental evidence. Having school children become familiar with this technique is an immensely valuable life skill if it makes them recognise it when pundits are using it.
For a question of whether something is ethical - a highly subjective judgement - arguing either way should be very easy to a moderately intelligent person.
I was on my school's debate team, and I'd usually pick the side that I disagreed with to argue. It's much easier when you already know the points that the other side will make, because they're the points that you agree with.
Because factories are not actually a good long-term investment. Apple actually does build factories for things like flash chips, but gives them to other companies in exchange for significantly lower prices. After a year or two, the factory is basically obsolete and Apple stops caring, while the manufacturing company can still make some money by selling cheap, lower-capacity flash from a factory that they basically got for free. A few more years later and they have an asset that's worthless and effectively need to build a new factory or, at least, replace all of the equipment inside it, which costs about the same. To make a profit from manufacturing consumer electronics, you need to constantly be investing in new processes or you'll end up with overheads that are much greater than your competitors at best, or be simply unable to build what the customer wants at worst.
No, he's doing it because it allows him to push IP treaties onto countries with growing economies and emerging markets that benefit his other investments.
I've not bought any ebooks with DRM in them, but when I rent a DVD that has some sort of copy protection that stops it playing with VLC then I send it back marked defective. The rental company then has to check or replace the disk. I also tick the 'don't send me this again' box, so the studio won't get any revenue. It probably makes little difference when it's just me, but if a lot of people do it then it will start costing them significantly more to carry encumbered DVDs than normal ones.
That depends on the court's interpretation. They could plausibly argue that the BBC was delivering it you your VPN host within the UK (legal and within contract) and you were then copying it to a remote location (violating copyright law).
It's a property of the service, which includes the client and APIs. iCloud is exposed via a set of Cocoa APIs to application developers and handles the encryption in a way that allows Apple to decrypt it. Sure, an application can pre-encrypt the data before uploading, but that isn't the default behaviour.
Not true. It's absolutely fine to store your data on someone else's server as long as it's encrypted, you have the key and they don't. For example, using tarsnap for backups should not be a problem, because the data is encrypted on the client and uploaded. Someone I know just submitted a PhD thesis on storing data securely on untrusted servers (well, a bit more than just that) and it's quite possible. That doesn't solve the reliability issue, of course, you still have to trust the remote site to stay in business, and to have adequate redundancy and backups. Even that can be addressed by sending your data to multiple providers.
I still use tapes today, and I think they would be nice for home use since I can pick up LTO-3 tapes for about $15 a pop, and LTO-5 tapes for around $42 each.
Not really home user price. LTO-3 is 400GB, LTO-5 is 1.5TB. At that sort of capacity, a home user is unlikely to need more than a handful of tapes. With LTO-5, three tapes would be enough for most home users with fairly aggressive backup strategy: two off-site, one being rewritten. If you're only buying three tapes, the cost of the drives becomes very important. The cheapest LTO-5 drives I can find cost over $1,000. At that price, you may as well just buy three 1.5TB hard drives and save the money. Tape is only really cost effective for situations where you have a lot of tapes.
7) Avoid any topics that might offend her unless you're sure you know her stance - that is, religion, politics, which text editor to use, etc.
I agree with most of your points, but not this one, unless your goal is just to get her into bed. Avoiding topics where you may have strongly differing opinions early on can just mean that you waste a lot of time before finding out that you're incompatible. If you've been together for a few months before you learn that she's an EMACS user, imagine how you'd feel...
Corporate tax rate is significantly higher than personal
This is quite misleading. As an individual or a corporation, you pay tax on income minus losses, whoever the rules on what you can put in the loss column are a lot more strict for individuals. That means that the people who go to the effort of setting up a company (or a set of companies) to control their assets end up paying a lot less tax on their income overall. The cost of setting up a shell company to do this is more or less constant, which means that it's far more likely that someone with more money will do so, because the marginal gain is significantly greater.
The best suggestion I've seen is a form of hierarchical delegated voting. Each individual can delegate his or her vote to someone else, either on every issue, or on issues within a broad category (e.g. everything related to defence, foreign policy, science, whatever). People can also delegate votes that have been delegate to them and you can withdraw your delegation with no notice, but you then can't delegate to someone else for a week. This means that people with a lot of votes delegate to them can work as politicians do now for as long as they retain the support of their constituency (which almost certainly won't be geographically based), but can't easily abuse their position. It also means that wedge issues become irrelevant. You can delegate your vote to a generic Republican or Democrat candidate on, for example, gay marriage or abortion, but then to someone with opinions that reflect your own on other issues.
Hmm, which license do we blame for incompatibilities? Two choices:
In one corner, there's a short license that permits distribution in any form, includes a patent grant, and places no restrictions on people downstream other than revoking their patent license if they sue others and does not place any restrictions on what code can be linked to it.
In the other corner, we have a multi-page monstrosity that places strict restrictions on exactly what can be linked with it to such a degree that different versions of the same license are mutually incompatible.
CUPS is not Apple-originated, but Apple did buy the company that created it. Libdispatch is entirely Apple-original. LLVM is not, but Apple-paid developers wrote a significant amount of the code (I think they're now down to less than half, but that's because of others - including Google - contributing more, not Apple contributing less). Clang was originally created by Apple, open sourced, and a lot of code contributions still come from Apple. Launchd was created by Apple, released under the APSL, and then relicensed as Apache 2 at the request of FreeBSD developers. Darwin Streaming Server and Calendar and Contacts Server (CalDav / CardDAV server) are also Apple-originated open source projects. Oh, and so is mDNSResponder.
Those are the ones from the top of my head, but Apple has also contributed to a number of projects that they did not create, which is in my mind more laudable than reinventing the wheel...
Add to that: you don't support open source software by using it, you support it by contributing. If you're using it, then that's easy because you can file bug reports. If you're not, the simplest contributions you can make are either donate some money towards development or create a detailed set of requirements that explain why you're not using it. What does the proprietary program that you end up using do that the open source alternative doesn't (or doesn't do as well) that you need? If you can identify the missing features, that's valuable. If you're also willing to contribute to a fund to improve a project, then that's even better. Open source may or may not be the best choice now, but maybe you can help it become the best choice...
Slashdot Mirror
Choosing not to buy minerals from a particular source doesn't affect anything, as they just end up being sold to someone else for the same price
Only if there are other buyers. And, if a large number of buyers are unwilling to do business with some suppliers then the other buyers may be in a position to push the price down.
They also forgot that they were selling luxury goods. A company like Oracle or Microsoft can get away with a certain amount of customer irritation because people use their products to make money and need to plan a migration strategy and spend money to switch away. A game publisher is not just competing with other game sellers, it's competing with other sources of entertainment for a finite budget. In a recession, luxury spending is the first thing that most people cut and that pushes down the supply of dollars that EA is competing for. They made it very easy for people to put them at the top of their spending cut list.
You seriously do NOT know what a FRAND patent is, and that it can NOT be used to sue someone.
You absolutely can sue over a FRAND patent. FRAND means Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory. The patent holder must offer to license the patent to all comers under these terms. If someone decides not to take the offered license and still infringes the patent then the patent holder can still sue.
it was bloody obvious that Florian was a "paid for opinion" going back a few years
It wasn't obvious to me. I assumed that no company would be stupid enough to pay for someone to spout things as obviously wrong as Florian - that they'd want shills who could slip misinformation into otherwise-insightful posts. Apparently Oracle has very low standards for shills. On the one hand, I think it's great that shills are so blatant, on the other I wonder if there's a job opportunity if I ever get bored...
Look for 'permanent revolution' in your favourite reference source. The Communist philosophy required expansion and continued conversion of new countries to communism. The goal was to spread to the entire world. Marx suggested that capitalism was just one stage in the development of a society that eventually ended with communism[1].
Immediately after the second world war, the Russians had an enormous army, including massive numbers of tanks and economy geared to their production. Within a few years, they had nukes too. When you have a well-armed country that espouses a philosophy of turning every country with your political system into one that you oppose, along with a very well funded and organised intelligence arm that exists to promote revolutions in other countries, you have a reason to worry. Oh, and the USSR wasn't that far away. If you take a look at this map you can see how close it came to the USA (specifically, Alaska). They had a large staging area for an oversea invasion, with only a slightly larger distance at sea than D-Day invasion.
By the later stages of the cold war, it wasn't about capitalism or communism - both sides were practicing slight different forms of oligarchy and having a Big Scary Enemy was very useful. Since the end of the cold war, the USA has flailed around trying to find a replacement.
[1] It's still not entirely clear that he was wrong, although the Soviet approach of skipping most of the other steps clearly did end up with totalitarianism rather than communism.
12% is basically impossible for any essay that cites something else. Turnitin also counts citations that other people also cited as duplications, so all of my students got a 20%+ similarity rating just from having similar bibliographies to other papers and from the occasional (attributed) quote.
They're also pretty useless. I tried using them for a course I taught. I tested it initially by providing it with the PDF of the notes. I was slightly impressed that it had already found the PDF of the notes on the course site and added it to its index. I was less impressed that it said the bit-for-bit identical copy that I'd uploaded was 70% the same as the online version. If 70% means 'every byte in this file is the same as every byte in the other file' then I wonder what 80% means. Apparently 20% means that it couldn't find anything that was copied. It also has a complete inability to detect quotes and citations, so generally a higher score meant a good essay because students who quoted relevant parts of sources and cited them got flagged by turnitin for plagiarism even though the source that turnitin 'found' was the one specified next to the quote.
You could probably get mostly the same results by just running diff on the essay text and the contents of everything it cited...
If the position is wrong, it is impossible to argue for it effectively. Therefore it is unjust to dock points for failing to argue for an incorrect position effectively.
Not at all. To start with, few things are completely wrong. Consider something like the luminiferous aether or the ancient greek theory of how vision worked. It's possible to argue quite convincingly for either because it's only in the last few hundred years that we've had experiments that have allowed us to disprove either. Unless someone else brings up one of these experiments (which they wouldn't in an essay because there is no response) then you can be quite convincing. It's the exact technique used by the best intelligent design advocates or global warming deniers: say things that are entirely plausible as long as you ignore some subset of experimental evidence. Having school children become familiar with this technique is an immensely valuable life skill if it makes them recognise it when pundits are using it.
For a question of whether something is ethical - a highly subjective judgement - arguing either way should be very easy to a moderately intelligent person.
I was on my school's debate team, and I'd usually pick the side that I disagreed with to argue. It's much easier when you already know the points that the other side will make, because they're the points that you agree with.
They have more than sixty thousand employees
For reference, Samsung has 220,000 employees.
Because factories are not actually a good long-term investment. Apple actually does build factories for things like flash chips, but gives them to other companies in exchange for significantly lower prices. After a year or two, the factory is basically obsolete and Apple stops caring, while the manufacturing company can still make some money by selling cheap, lower-capacity flash from a factory that they basically got for free. A few more years later and they have an asset that's worthless and effectively need to build a new factory or, at least, replace all of the equipment inside it, which costs about the same. To make a profit from manufacturing consumer electronics, you need to constantly be investing in new processes or you'll end up with overheads that are much greater than your competitors at best, or be simply unable to build what the customer wants at worst.
No, he's doing it because it allows him to push IP treaties onto countries with growing economies and emerging markets that benefit his other investments.
I've not bought any ebooks with DRM in them, but when I rent a DVD that has some sort of copy protection that stops it playing with VLC then I send it back marked defective. The rental company then has to check or replace the disk. I also tick the 'don't send me this again' box, so the studio won't get any revenue. It probably makes little difference when it's just me, but if a lot of people do it then it will start costing them significantly more to carry encumbered DVDs than normal ones.
That depends on the court's interpretation. They could plausibly argue that the BBC was delivering it you your VPN host within the UK (legal and within contract) and you were then copying it to a remote location (violating copyright law).
The usually excellent BBC 'Click' programme
From this we can conclude that it was written by someone who either:
After that, it's safe to ignore the rest of TFS and skip TFA entirely.
It's a property of the service, which includes the client and APIs. iCloud is exposed via a set of Cocoa APIs to application developers and handles the encryption in a way that allows Apple to decrypt it. Sure, an application can pre-encrypt the data before uploading, but that isn't the default behaviour.
Common law does not trump statue law, and RIPA explicitly requires you to hand over encryption keys.
Not true. It's absolutely fine to store your data on someone else's server as long as it's encrypted, you have the key and they don't. For example, using tarsnap for backups should not be a problem, because the data is encrypted on the client and uploaded. Someone I know just submitted a PhD thesis on storing data securely on untrusted servers (well, a bit more than just that) and it's quite possible. That doesn't solve the reliability issue, of course, you still have to trust the remote site to stay in business, and to have adequate redundancy and backups. Even that can be addressed by sending your data to multiple providers.
I still use tapes today, and I think they would be nice for home use since I can pick up LTO-3 tapes for about $15 a pop, and LTO-5 tapes for around $42 each.
Not really home user price. LTO-3 is 400GB, LTO-5 is 1.5TB. At that sort of capacity, a home user is unlikely to need more than a handful of tapes. With LTO-5, three tapes would be enough for most home users with fairly aggressive backup strategy: two off-site, one being rewritten. If you're only buying three tapes, the cost of the drives becomes very important. The cheapest LTO-5 drives I can find cost over $1,000. At that price, you may as well just buy three 1.5TB hard drives and save the money. Tape is only really cost effective for situations where you have a lot of tapes.
7) Avoid any topics that might offend her unless you're sure you know her stance - that is, religion, politics, which text editor to use, etc.
I agree with most of your points, but not this one, unless your goal is just to get her into bed. Avoiding topics where you may have strongly differing opinions early on can just mean that you waste a lot of time before finding out that you're incompatible. If you've been together for a few months before you learn that she's an EMACS user, imagine how you'd feel...
Corporate tax rate is significantly higher than personal
This is quite misleading. As an individual or a corporation, you pay tax on income minus losses, whoever the rules on what you can put in the loss column are a lot more strict for individuals. That means that the people who go to the effort of setting up a company (or a set of companies) to control their assets end up paying a lot less tax on their income overall. The cost of setting up a shell company to do this is more or less constant, which means that it's far more likely that someone with more money will do so, because the marginal gain is significantly greater.
The best suggestion I've seen is a form of hierarchical delegated voting. Each individual can delegate his or her vote to someone else, either on every issue, or on issues within a broad category (e.g. everything related to defence, foreign policy, science, whatever). People can also delegate votes that have been delegate to them and you can withdraw your delegation with no notice, but you then can't delegate to someone else for a week. This means that people with a lot of votes delegate to them can work as politicians do now for as long as they retain the support of their constituency (which almost certainly won't be geographically based), but can't easily abuse their position. It also means that wedge issues become irrelevant. You can delegate your vote to a generic Republican or Democrat candidate on, for example, gay marriage or abortion, but then to someone with opinions that reflect your own on other issues.
In one corner, there's a short license that permits distribution in any form, includes a patent grant, and places no restrictions on people downstream other than revoking their patent license if they sue others and does not place any restrictions on what code can be linked to it.
In the other corner, we have a multi-page monstrosity that places strict restrictions on exactly what can be linked with it to such a degree that different versions of the same license are mutually incompatible.
Now, personally, I'd blame the second one.
CUPS is not Apple-originated, but Apple did buy the company that created it. Libdispatch is entirely Apple-original. LLVM is not, but Apple-paid developers wrote a significant amount of the code (I think they're now down to less than half, but that's because of others - including Google - contributing more, not Apple contributing less). Clang was originally created by Apple, open sourced, and a lot of code contributions still come from Apple. Launchd was created by Apple, released under the APSL, and then relicensed as Apache 2 at the request of FreeBSD developers. Darwin Streaming Server and Calendar and Contacts Server (CalDav / CardDAV server) are also Apple-originated open source projects. Oh, and so is mDNSResponder.
Those are the ones from the top of my head, but Apple has also contributed to a number of projects that they did not create, which is in my mind more laudable than reinventing the wheel...
I mean, it was god that created all of those diseases in the first place, right?
No, they evolved. God only created the tasty plants and animals.
Add to that: you don't support open source software by using it, you support it by contributing. If you're using it, then that's easy because you can file bug reports. If you're not, the simplest contributions you can make are either donate some money towards development or create a detailed set of requirements that explain why you're not using it. What does the proprietary program that you end up using do that the open source alternative doesn't (or doesn't do as well) that you need? If you can identify the missing features, that's valuable. If you're also willing to contribute to a fund to improve a project, then that's even better. Open source may or may not be the best choice now, but maybe you can help it become the best choice...